From 1914 to 1925Cassuto was chief rabbi of Florence and then in 1925 became professor of Hebrew language and literature in the University of Florence and then took the chair of Hebrew at the University of Rome.

His interests focused on Bible exegesis in which he contested the documentary theory of Wellhausen on the origin of the Pentateuch, postulating its redaction to a school around the 10th century BCE.

From the notes of George Cassuto I have made this reconstruction of the Italian family in those days, a reconstruction of course incomplete and not quite reliable, as it is made on the base of incomplete data and guesses.

The earliest Cassuto mentioned is: MOSESCASSUTO, living in in Livorno in the 17th century.

Umberto had a son Nathan (born 1910), murdered in world war II, and a daughter Milka who married Salzman.

Cassuto explains: the Torah speaks of the Taninim (and it may be added that it uses the term "beri'a") in order to combat an idolatrous idea that was prevalent at the time.

In this spirit, Cassuto also explains the verses describing the gathering of the water into one place on the third day of creation as coming to reject the notion that the sea - or the "angel of the sea" - fought against God as an equal.

Cassuto suggests just the opposite: the Torah comes to exclude what was accepted law in the ancient Near East, that if a person is found liable for the death of another man's child, his own child is put to death.

Cassuto argues that because the people were already familiar with basic themes of Epic of Gilgamesh, God used this narrative, but made significant changes to teach the people certain lessons.

As Cassuto writes, “The Torah could not very well pass over in silence the ancient poetic tradition regarding the Flood, which was already widely current among the Israelites….

Indeed, whether one accepts Cassuto’s view that the Torah is of Divine origin, or believes that the Torah developed as oral traditions that were passed from generation to generation and eventually written down, what is most important is not its similarities to the Gilgamesh Epic, but its differences.

As UmbertoCassuto (1973) correctly observed, Genesis 6:1-4 “is unquestionably one of the obscurest sections of the Torah” (p.

We read in Genesis 6:1-2, “When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose” (NIV).

Cassuto sheds more light on the traditional Jewish understanding of the “sons of God”: “The oldest interpretation, so far as we know, is: the angels.

A parallel is seen in the consistent use of Yehovah on scriptural greetings (Judges 6:12; Psalms 129:8; Ruth 2:4) and in the actual rabbinical dictum that required use of Yehovah in greeting another.

Even in modern Hebrew, Cassuto says, "We are exact in our choice of words, we employ the tetragrammaton [Yehovah] when we have in mind the traditional Jewish idea of the Deity, and the name Elohim when we wish to express the philosophic or universal concept of the Godhead."

Cassuto further comments that Moses uses God’s name Yehovah exclusively in Genesis 11:1-9 when talking about God’s breaking up the nations.

Cassuto argues that the differences between different sections of the Torah, with respect to the divine names, style, and content, stem from the fact that they describe different aspects of the relationship between God and man and the world.

Obviously, a general assertion like this does not suffice, and Cassuto wrestles in each section with biblical criticism's arguments regarding redundancies and contradictions.

Traditional Jews may not find all of Cassuto's ideas acceptable, but he has done a great service in demonstrating how flimsy are the foundations upon which biblical criticism sometimes rests.

Cassuto explains: G-d had already predicted to Abraham in the Covenant between the Pieces, the Brit bayn hab'tar'im (Genesis 15:13): "Ya'do'ah tay'dah kee ger yee'hee'yeh zar'ah'chah b'eretz lo lah'hem," You shall surely know that your children will be strangers in a land that is not theirs.

In this covenant, the prophecy of exile, servitude and persecution is pronounced, in effect, predicting the exile to Egypt and the subsequent triumphant salvation.

This, maintains Cassuto, is exactly what is predicted by the repetition of the stories.

He made it possible for me to go, and when I told my brother Ben, he wanted to join me. Ben is a veterinarian, but because of our family history, he has a deep interest in the life of the Jewish people and their role on the world stage.

I knew about UmbertoCassuto, the great biblical scholar who did a study of the book of Exodus in the 1950s.

When I discussed this view with David Cassuto, he agreed that such social strata might exist, but he justified it by stating that once the prosperity of Israel had been established by the Jewish people, the Arabs and Palestinians benefited from the new world the Jews of post 1948 had built.

On Nov. 6, 1943 the first group of Jews was deported to extermination camps from the synagogue.

Five days later another group was taken by the Nazis in the Carmine Church: among them was Nathan Cassuto, son of UmbertoCassuto, who had abandoned his own career as a physician and had assumed the spiritual guidance of the community.

On June 6, 1944, 16 aged Jews were taken from the home for the aged and sent to Germany.

Several theories regarding the origin and typology of Judeo-Italian have been proposed, most notably by David S. Blondheim (1923, 1924), UmbertoCassuto (1929, 1935), and Giuseppe Sermoneta and Luisa Cuomo (1982, 1989).

Blondheim's theory postulated the existence of a Judeo-Latin dialect, which would have evolved parallel to Vulgar Latin, and have been the substratus for a pan-Romance Jewish language.

Cassuto argues that Ham represents the Canaanite people who were guilty of sexual immorality.

Thus "[t]he Canaanites were to suffer the curse and the bondage not because of the sins of Ham, but because they themselves acted like Ham, because of their own transgressions, which resembled those attributed to Ham in this allegory."

According to one version of Jewish legend, Noah could not curse Ham for his disrespectful acts toward him because Ham was included in the blessing God conferred after the flood.

In a 1969 symposium on the subject of abortion, several participants used the verse to justify liberal positions--including at least one who, during the course of the conference, became persuaded by it to alter his previously held "pro-life" views.

Other participants resorted to alternative interpretations, construing the word "mischief" to refer to the fate of the fetus as well as of the mother (this was cited in the name of the distinguished Jewish Biblical scholar UmbertoCassuto).

Still others argued that on this point, the text, like much of Biblical law, was to be superseded by other quotations in both the "Old Testament" and Christian scriptures that seem to refer poetically to the existence of souls before birth.

In Exodus the contexts seem filled with a variety of unrelated issues; however, the general contexts concern warnings about adopting the practices of the various heathen nations in and around the promised land (cf.

23:23-24, 34:11-16.) UmbertoCassuto, a Jewish commentator, notes a link to the previous command about bringing the first fruits, which was also a Canaanite practice.

His paraphrase would read, "Yes, offer your first-fruits, but dont do the kid-boiling ceremony with which they accompany their offerings." He cites a Ugaritic inscription, "boil a kid in milk, a lamb in butter," referring to a fertility ritual.

But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Distinguished Jewish exegete UmbertoCassuto interprets and translates Exodus 21:22-25 in his celebrated Commentary of the Book of Exodus:

When men strive together and they hurt unintentionally a woman with child, and her children come forth but no mischief happens—that is, the woman and the children do not die—the one who hurt her shall surely be punished by a fine.

I found Baden’s paper fascinating, because it was a case study in the use of literary-aesthetic analysis to critique source criticism.

Baden focused on three studies—by UmbertoCassuto, Isaac Kikawada, and Jan Fokkelmann—whose authors claim that there are literary-aesthetic features in the canonical form of the Babel story that are damaged by splitting the story into two sources á là Hermann Gunkel.

Baden showed convincingly that all of these features can actually be shown to operate within the sources individually.

www.heardworld.com /higgaion/?p=457 (1109 words)

Torah Genesis(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-29)

In his commentary on Genesis, Italian Jewish scholar UmbertoCassuto notes the following uses of the number seven:

Here are Cassuto’s words, which perfectly capture the purpose and meaning of the Genesis Creation account:

The purpose of the Torah in this section is to teach us that the whole world and all that it contains were created by the word of the One God, according to His will, which operates without restraint.